Skip links

Hello St Louis

This semester is my internship semester. Instead of having any classes, every final year education student goes out and teaches under the supervision of a cooperating teacher at a school, gaining experience in front of a classroom and putting to test the countless ideas, theories and methods we have been introduced to so far.

Usually, we are placed somewhere within Saskatchewan. However, a unique opportunity came my way after a conversation with Alec Couros (@courosa) who is a professor at the University of Regina. During a workshop/presentation he was doing, he mentioned this amazing school in St Louis doing some incredible things with technology and made a comment about hoping to send interns there some day.

Soon after, I tweeted Alec asking him more. He referred me to Elizabeth Helfant (@ehelfant), who works with technology in the upper (high) school at the school. For the past few months we have been tweeting back and forth figuring out the details in order to make this work.

Finally, after finalizing some details I embarked on a 2091 km (1299 miles) drive to St Louis, MO. I arrived and have been in meetings and PD sessions (I plan to blog more about what I’ve learned in a later post) all week learning the ins and outs of the school. Needless to say, I’m really excited for classes to start and finally start to try out some the ideas I have developed. I am planning on blogging my experience here over the time I am here.

I felt the need to share this story to illustrate how powerful social media tools can be and the doors they can open. Had it not been for Twitter, I would not be here right now. Thank you Twitter.

Post comment

Enjoy internship Kyle. Doing an internship outside of Saskatchewan is tough, as I experienced last year. The biggest obstacle I found was the different expectations between myself and my coop. Just make sure you keep communicating with your mentors and coop and I’m sure it will be an amazing experience just as mine was in the UK.